British Museum holds on to UK top tourism spot

The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions has announced its members’ visitor figures for 2015 today, which saw an average increase of 1.61 per cent on 2014 visitor numbers to London attractions.

Scottish attractions had the greatest increase of 5.48 per cent.

Overall 124.4 million visits were made to the top 230 ALVA sites in 2015.

A staggering 65,218,272 people visited attractions in London and therefore it is no surprise that the top ten most visited attractions were all London based.

The British Museum continued to be the most popular visitor attraction overall for the ninth year running with 6,820,686 visitors and remaining in second place was the National Gallery with 5,908,254 visitors.

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Third place was achieved by the Natural History Museum, which saw 5,284,023 visitors.

Temporary Exhibitions played a crucial part in this year’s figures throughout the UK.

The largest increase in visitor numbers in the top ten attractions was Somerset House, which saw an increase of 31 per cent (3,235,104 and eighth place) – mainly as a result of their temporary exhibitions and public programmes.

Bernard Donoghue, director of ALVA, commented: “2015 continued to be a record year mainly due to our members continuing to show how diverse the UK is to both domestic and overseas visitors.

“More people visited the V&A, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, combined, than visited Venice.

“More people visited the British Museum and the National Gallery, combined, than visited Barcelona and more people visited the Southbank Centre, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, combined, than visited Hong Kong.”